Nature's Case for God

A Brief Biblical Argument

John M. Frame

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683591337
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Can we know anything about God apart from the Bible? Many Protestant Christians are suspicious of natural theology, which claims that we can learn about God through revelation outside the Bible. How can we know anything about God apart from Scripture? In Nature's Case for God, distinguished theologian John Frame argues that Christians are not forbidden from seeking to learn about God from his creation. In fact, the Bible itself shows this to be possible.In nine short and lucid chapters that include questions for discussion, Frame shows us what we can learn about God and how we relate to him from the world outside the Bible. If the heavens really do declare the glory of God, as the psalmist claims, it makes a huge difference for how we understand God and how we introduce him to those who don't yet know Christ.

Part One

THE WITNESS OF THE CREATED WORLD

How do we begin thinking about the natural world as a testimony to God’s reality? We should not look at nature autonomously, on the basis of our own reasoning power, but on the basis of God’s revelation in Scripture. Therefore, in the first part of this book, I ask what Scripture says about finding God in the world he has made.

Chapter 1

THE GREATNESS

O Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babies and infants,

you have established strength because of your foes,

to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

and crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

—PSALM 8

One of the most obvious testimonies to God in the natural world is the sheer size of it all. Both the land and the sky stretch farther than the eye can see. We live in the midst of something indescribably great, and greatness is a palpable mark of God. Immanuel Kant, who rejected the traditional theistic proofs, nevertheless expressed awe at the “starry heavens above” (which I am considering here) and “the moral law within” (which I shall consider later).6 But Blaise Pascal, writing in 1560, expressed more profoundly the impact of this greatness upon us:

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.7

Pascal was himself a scientist writing at a time like ours, in which knowledge of the cosmos was multiplying. But he saw not only how small we are in comparison with the universe, but also how large we are in comparison with the microscopic world. He goes on in Pensées 72:

But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation.8

So Pascal saw humanity as the convergence of two infinites—one unimaginably great, one unimaginably small:

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret, he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.

What will he do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end. All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite. Who will follow these marvellous processes? The Author of these wonders understands them. None other can do so.9

While Pascal was a scientist, in these passages he was not depending on his scientific expertise. He was, rather, describing the obvious and expressing his amazement at it. Who of us can deny the greatness of the world we are in, both the vastness of the world larger than us and of what is smaller, even within us?

President Barack Obama once said, “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”10 At the time, critics charged him with denigrating the accomplishments of entrepreneurs; supporters said that the critics quoted him out of context. In context, Obama sought at the very least to persuade business leaders of their dependence on infrastructure and spending that were provided by the government. But certainly, government, too, is dependent—dependent on its historical origins; dependent on those who put it in power; dependent on the conditions that maintain its power and legitimize its authority.

Likewise, when we think of our achievements from a cosmic perspective, it is very difficult to isolate what we do from what has been done for us. We are alive because of a vast causal nexus above and below us. The same is true of our abilities, and, therefore, our achievements. Beethoven could write symphonies because he came from a vast family tree, and because all his ancestors breathed the earth’s air and received food and drink from its seeds, rain, and sunshine. He had the right genes, education, and experience. At any moment of his life, he might have been destroyed by a falling tree or a tiny virus. Or one of his ancestors might have been destroyed, preventing Beethoven’s family line from bringing him to life. He wrote the symphonies; nobody else did, and nobody can take those away from him. But his achievements are dependent on something vastly larger than he.

Given the greatness of the universe and our own frailty, is it not wondrous that any of us survive, and even more wondrous that any of us accomplish what we do? That wonder at the sheer greatness of it all is one of the roots of religion. Is it even slightly surprising that since before the beginning of written history, human beings have been religious?

But worship is not just wonder; it is thankfulness. Given the vastness of the world, would it make any sense at all for people to take sole credit for their sustenance and their accomplishments? The good things of our lives (and the sufferings as well, to be sure) come from the Greatness.

Most human beings through all time have accepted the responsibility of acknowledging the Greatness to some extent. But these acknowledgments have been mixed with pride. We want to take credit for the blessings of life, and as a result, we feel entitled to look down on fellow human beings who have not been so blessed. To that extent, we fail in our appreciation of the Greatness. We don’t understand how truly great it is.

So the tendency of human worship is to diminish the Greatness, to bring it down to our level. The Athenians of Paul’s day thought that “the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:29). Thus is worship turned from what it ought to be (an acknowledgment of the Greatness) to a distortion, a self-glorification.

If we worship the Greatness, and only the Greatness, we are certainly worshiping the God of the Bible, for none is as great as he is (Pss 47:2; 86:10; 95:3; 135:5). But there is much more to learn about how he is great, which we shall now explore.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1.Describe a personal experience that led you to reflect on the greatness of the world. How did that affect your understanding of yourself?

2.From what you know of modern science, has it challenged or vindicated Pascal’s observations? How?

3.Describe one or two modern examples of what the Bible calls idolatry.

FOR FURTHER READING

John Byl, The Divine Challenge: On Matter, Mind, Math & Meaning. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2004.

John Frame, The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm.

Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006.

Chapter 2

THE ONENESS

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your

heart and with all your soul and

with all your might.

—DEUTERONOMY 6:4–5

Nature tells us about more than the sheer greatness of God. It tells us that God is one. When the apostle Paul used natural revelation to attack the idolatry of the Athenians, he was also attacking polytheism. He did this because those who thought “the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:29), also thought that the divine being was many rather than one. There was a god of the sea, a goddess of love, gods of marriage, agriculture, wine, and war. Oh, and there was another one, in case they had missed him. Here is Paul’s account:

For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, “To the unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. (Acts 17:23–25)

At least the Greeks were modest enough to admit that they might not have included all the gods in their catalog. They understood there might be some defects in their knowledge of the pantheon. And, of course, that ignorance could have some bad repercussions. Who knows what the penalties might be for neglecting the unknown god? If that god were the god of wealth, for example, ...